As I observed during the IT saga aka "Govt IT - a recipe for rip-offs":

"A simple analysis of the time line of the Inquiry shows a remarkable tendency for the Government and those we might consider to be in its team to publish material just before key Inquiry dates, or on one occasion handed to the Committee Chairman during an evidence session. With that in mind we were curious to see what else had been published in the last few days that might be relevant to this report."

And lo, there was...

I have a uneasy feeling about Silicon Roundabout. It seems like the Californian gold rush, where huge profits could be made:

selling picks, shovels and blue jeans

"Peter Day weighs up the evidence, talking to some of London's most promising social networking companies, and the venture capitalists and business groups supporting them"

Great announcement but what does it amount to?

Today two interesting items have been published. The London School of Economics has published a report Total cost of ownership of open source software (pdf) detailing all the ways open source is a good idea and then there's Mark Ballard's HMRC rethinks £8.5bn megadeal as large suppliers resist flagship IT reforms.

The LSE study is a good piece of work unfortunately the Ballard article points to its likely effect: not much.

With thanks to Bristol Wireless yet another government other than the UK Government is failing to find reasons not to use open source software (oss)

Yes, it would seem that the French government is "stimulating competition" (sic) and apparently without any "concerns" about "how easily oss could be hacked" (perhaps because they agree with the US Govt regarding security but using the one of the better agile techniques...